The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [82]
Then I cheered from afar in the mid-1970s as Drake and Sagan beamed a message of greeting to the great globular cluster M13, which is a concentration of a quarter million stars in the constellation Hercules. While I knew there wasn’t much practical science involved with this intragalactic phone call—it would take more than twenty-two thousand years for the message to reach its destination—nevertheless there was something romantic and adventurous about trying to communicate with the civilizations that most assuredly populated those distant stars.
All of this helped form my perspective as I would gaze over the years at the twinkling stars in the dark heavens. But now my attitude was changing. After studying the latest evidence from various scientific disciplines—from astronomy to cosmology to geology to oceanography to microbiology—my conclusions were being tugged in the opposite direction.
It’s turning out that the Earth is anything but ordinary, that our sun is far from average, and that even the position of our planet in the galaxy is eerily fortuitous. The idea that the universe is a flourishing hothouse of advanced civilizations is now being undermined by surprising new scientific discoveries and fresh thinking.
In short, new findings are suggesting that we are special. More and more scientists are studying the mind-boggling convergence of scores of extraordinary “coincidences” that make intelligent life possible on Earth and concluding that this can’t possibly be an accident. They’re seeing signs of design, a kind of unlikely fine-tuning for life similar to the fine-tuning of physics that we explored in the previous chapter.
In fact, said one noted researcher, “new evidence which could potentially have refuted the [design] hypothesis has only ended up confirming it.” 11 Once again, we find the evidence of science pointing in the direction of a Creator.
And rather than our lives being purposeless, scientists for the first time are uncovering concrete evidence that suggests at least one surprising purpose for which we were created—that is, to discover and learn about the surroundings in which we have been placed.
In other words, as we’ll see in this chapter, one purpose for which we were designed is to do science itself.
RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME
As the new millennium dawned, geologist Peter D. Ward and astronomer Donald Brownlee, both professors at the University of Washington in Seattle, published a provocative and highly successful book that raised this disquieting question about Earth: “What if it is utterly unique: the only planet with animals in this galaxy or even in the visible universe . . . ?” 12
Their book, Rare Earth, marshals evidence from a wide range of scientific disciplines to build its case that “not only intelligent life, but even the simplest of animal life, is exceedingly rare in our galaxy and in the universe.” 13 They called the conclusion “inescapable” that “Earth is a rare place indeed.” 14
Although Ward and Brownlee uncritically buy into the idea that microbial life may very well be more prevalent, a view they draw from the way life seemed to have effortlessly developed on Earth “about as soon as environmental conditions allowed its survival,” 15 their conviction that the existence of complex life is “extraordinarily rare” is bolstered by convincing data divorced from any theological framework.
Calling their book “carefully reasoned and scientifically astute,” Don Johanson, director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University, remarked: “In spite of our wishful thinking, there just may not be other Mozarts or Monets.” 16 David Levy, of comet Shoemaker-Levy fame, added, “As we know it on Earth, complex life might be very rare, and very precious.” 17 Said the Times of London: “If they are right it could be time to reverse a process that has been going on since Copernicus.” 18
More and more scientists are observing the stunning ways in which our planet—against all odds—manages to fulfill a